


[ redacted ]

by seductiveturnip



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, BAMF Natasha, Canon Compliant, Clint Barton Feels, F/M, Mutual Pining, Nick Fury Knows All, POV Natasha Romanov, Possibly Unrequited Love, Protective Steve Rogers, Romantic Friendship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 18:42:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9561827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seductiveturnip/pseuds/seductiveturnip
Summary: Fury looks at her. “You love him.”She could deny it. Go over twenty-four different covers in her head. But Fury is made from the some kind of stone as she is. He knows. And this - this is the one thing she cannot hide.“Yes,” she says, and her heart burns with the finality of it. “Yes. I do.”He assesses her, as if searching her face for something – emotion; guilt; an apology - before letting out a loud exhale. “You’re compromised. I’m taking you off the mission.”“Not necessary. I’ll take care of it.”Fury’s face doesn’t change a fraction. “Is that so.”“Yes." she says calmly. "If I had to, I would let him die.”He just fixes her with another long, impatient look, before gesturing towards the door. He’s looking at his paper as he calls to her, “You’re not as good a liar as you think you are, Agent Romanoff.”-Or: She’d pretty much always known he loved someone else. It’s just, that didn’t stop her from loving him, or him loving her back. Even though she knew, all along, that he was always going to leave her.





	1. [ prologue ]

 

 _“E_ _scape from the black widow spider_  
_is a miracle as great as art._  
_what a web she can weave_  
_slowly drawing you to her_  
_she'll embrace you_  
_then when she's satisfied_  
_she'll kill you_  
_still in her embrace_  
_and suck the blood from you. ”_

\- Charles Bukowski

 

* * *

 

 

The day Natasha turned twenty-four, the two of them went down and hung a lock on the Pont de l'Archevêché.

Natasha has never gone back to the bridge. She couldn’t even tell you if the lock was still even there.

She was drunk, at the time, and it was silly, because neither of them were sentimental. They were on a mission and she let it slip it was her birthday even though she shouldn’t have, and he told her this was no way to celebrate a her special day and they went to a pub and strolled around Paris and giggled like children and bought a lock to hang on a bridge. There’d been a moment – only a moment – when he looked at her so intently that her heart, if it had not been programmed to beat the way it did, would have hitched and stuttered and ached. But he ended up just flicking some lint of her shoulder and told her they should probably get back to the motel, that they had to have an early start, and she began to picture herself far, far away, somewhere, anywhere, where she had never seen him smile.

She doesn’t leave home much these days. Home, being her favourite safehouse, a tiny cottage in Switzerland, perhaps her most well-guarded secret. He knows where it is. Some days, she half hopes he’ll walk through the door.

She doesn’t see him so often anymore. He’s been talking about retiring for years and now Laura’s had a baby, and he’s been taking less and less missions and spending more and more time on the farm. She finally let them name this one after her, after years of resistance and embarrassment. But he hasn’t invited her down to meet the little man. A small, selfish part of her is somewhat glad – she’s always loved and hated seeing him there. Loved it, because of how relaxed and at home he always was, and hated it, because he never looked that way with her. But that was her own fault, besides. She’d pretty much always known he loved someone else. It’s just, that didn’t stop her from loving him, or him loving her back. Even though she knew, all along, that he was always going to leave her.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.


	2. [ zagreb ]

 

He finds her in Zagreb in the midst of a blistering snowstorm, and she cannot help but admire the symmetry of it all - she was born in the cold, and now she will die in the cold, frozen to a web of her own making. 

She’s on a job for a particularly prickly client. Freelancing pays well, gives her her freedom - she’d always been a little bit rootless, even as a child, trying to sneak out of the Red Room if just to get a glimpse of what the sky looked like at night - and it means the KGB will hand over their more, ahem, _unofficial_ cases. Which she doesn’t mind doing. Natalia Romanova wove a beautiful, flawless web: killing was an art, like anything else, and one she did exceptionally well.  She’d had her principles of course - in the beginning, she’d been one of the true believers. Thought that maybe, one day, she could see that all this blood she was spilling, she was spilling for Russia, for the good of her country, pulling the trigger to make the world a better place. Every regime had a ghost in their machine, and she knew that that was what she had been made for. _You were built for this,_ her Headmistress had purred the day she left, the day the KGB snapped her up. _You were born for this._

But killing for some kind of meaning, _for_ _the good of Russia_ , that had been a child’s pipe dream. She knew now, it was all about getting paid and not getting bitten. All this blood had never meant anything. It was just red.

Perhaps that’s how he finds her. She’d felt purposeless, maybe gotten sloppy. She’d started playing with her food again - something her teachers had worked tirelessly to train out of her - in her boredom, her arrogance. A warlord here, a corrupt politician there. She caught them in her web and let the corpses fall to the ground, knowing she’d never be caught. She’s a Black Widow, the best of them all, and she was tired of this pointless maze to which there seemed no exit. What was the point of it all – of her training, of her life? What was she but a weapon being fired by the same time of people she was ordered to kill?  
She would find out later how little intel he had been cleared for - all he knew at that time was that she was a woman, that she was dangerous, and SHIELD wanted her taken out immediately. He’d been waiting on a rooftop, having been given a four hour window (“ _I was freezing my dick off,”_ he recounts years later in a motel in Bangkok) when he sees her, a shadowy figure sweeping across the rooftops with an awful precision he’d never seen before in a human being. He wonders how it was she isn’t shivering. 

Because he didn’t know then. 

She was born in the winter, raised in the ice. There was a chill in her bones that would never thaw. 

He swings across the rooftop, but she's sensed him before he landed, must have, to have moved so quickly, because she has him pressed to the grated roof, poising a gun right between his eyes and kicking away his bow.  
“Who sent you?” she asks, almost impatiently, her voice heavily accented as she memorizes the details of his face to report later. Her elbow digs into his throat, her knee pressing at a key artery in his wrists - every part of her, pointed like a gun, aimed for the kill. He bucks up, manages to throw her off, but she lands, all grace and unaffected with barely a sound. She lunges forward, meeting all his blows effortlessly - she fights beautifully, almost robotically in his precision, with a relentlessness he cannot hope to match. She’s vicious. She’s unstoppable. He can barely keep up with her, as she uses his wrist to leverage her thighs around his neck. He’s got ten years and a hundred pounds on her, but the brutality, the graceful efficiency, the way every inch of her has been sculpted and moulded for war - it seems almost programmed. She barely breaks a sweat. 

At some point, he manages, somehow, to kick her feet out from under her, and she doesn’t know which of the two of them is more surprised. He pins her down, wrestles the gun from her hands, and she writhes and tries to unseat him for about a minute, manages to bruise one of his vertebrates in the process but it’s fruitless and she lets herself go limp. 

She’ll think about this moment, later. How she’d stared up at him, blank and defiant and unreadable, staring down the barrel of her own gun and thinking _this is it, this the end, this is the last time I’m ever going to be afraid of dying,_ and she found herself thinking about how she never took a mission to Paris – she’d dreamed of Paris as a little girl, fashioned an Eiffel Tower out a splint before they’d taken it from her and sliced the skin from the soles of her feet as punishment. 

He’s hesitating. She doesn’t understand why he’s hesitating, and it makes her all the more nervous. She wonders if he’s like her - if he likes to play with his food. If he’s deciding whether he should kill her now or risk it and have a little fun. 

“What are you waiting for, Robin Hood?” she tries for snark, effectively masking the wobble in her voice - the wobble that always comes when she’s sure she’s not getting out of this one, that she’s going to die - “It’s rude to keep a girl-”

“Just shut up a sec,” he grumbles out. There’s this wild, unashamed conflict written across his face, as if he’s never been trained to keep his emotions in check. He’s hesitating, and her heart is in her throat. She doesn’t know this yet, but he always hesitates before a kill.

But he doesn’t kill her. 

He has his orders, and still he doesn’t. There’s someone yelling at him in his earpiece, but he only looks down at her, fascinated and uncertain and mostly just _annoyed._ “I am so going to regret this,” he says, but he’s not speaking to her. “I am so going to regret this.” 

He makes a different call. 

And she knows that’s a debt she’ll never stop owing him for. 

 

* * *

 

 

She likes Nick Fury immediately, and he likes her, even though he’ll never admit it (his microexpressions give him away).

“I’m not playing game with you here, Romanova. I don’t suggest you fuck around.” He deadpans, blinking at her with one unamused eye.

“Shame. I like games,” she retorts, matching his tone.

“Agent Barton disobeyed orders. We don’t need another agent. Frankly, you’re probably more trouble than you’re worth, and I’m not a fan of paperwork. So I suggest you cut the bullshit or I’ll get someone with more conviction to carry out the mission.”

She sifts through her covers quickly. “I mean, I’m not going to tell you how to do your job, but I think we both know I’m a valuable asset.”

“How’s that?”

"You already know I’m a child of the Red Room. I’ve told you my level of clearance in the KGB. And you sent a highly-trained assassin to take me out – which, by the way, is kind of flattering. You know I’m good. And I’m offering my services.”

His face hasn’t changed. “Because you want to defect.” He sounds unconvinced.

“Sure, God Bless America. If you’ve got a job for me, I’ll carry it out. I don’t care who I’m killing as long as I get paid, and I’m a lot more obedient than your Agent Barton.”

“That’s not a high bar you’re aiming for there.”

She shrugs. “That’s on your recruitment, not me.”

“Oh, I know,” he grunts with a long-suffering sigh. “Alright, here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to deal with more important things that playing into your weird little web here, because you and your games have taken up the better half of my morning. You can either be a good little assassin and sign off that you’re playing for our team or you can keep being difficult and we’ll put a bullet in your head, make the Board happy and send you back to Mother Russia because I’ve got a lot of good agents here who are – believe it or not – far better than you and far less trouble. Your choice.”

The chair screeches on the ground as he pushes himself up, gathering his things and turning towards the door.

“You know,” he says quietly, “we do good work here. It means something.”

She chuckles humourlessly. “Isn’t that what they all say?”

“Like I said – it’s your choice.”

She doesn’t miss the tiny smile on his face as before the door clangs shut. “Welcome to S.H.I.E.L.D, Agent Romanova.”

 

 


	3. [ natasha romanoff ]

She hasn’t been cleared for duty yet and she’s itching for a mission. There’s been deprogramming and mandated therapy and evaluations, and now re-training and protocol guides, and then there’ll be a probationary period, and she’s basically crawling out of her own skin. Her current objective is to get cleared and get back out into the field – get back to doing _some_ thing, instead of watching all the other agents try not to watch her. She’s used to prying eyes, and she’s not much of a people-person anyway, but it might be nice to meet someone other than her thin-lipped handlers and evaluators who look at her like some sort of dangerous, exotic animal they’ve gotten stuck with trying to housebreak **.** The Black Widow is a solitary creature **–** she socializes only during seduction. She is nocturnal and spins webs during the daytime, can be seen hanging upside down in her web, exposing a telltale hourglass abdominal marking – bright red, to signal danger to predators and attackers.

A tray drops down on the other end of her empty table, a man sliding in across from her in the S.H.I.E.L.D. athletic gear. It’s Agent Barton, she realizes after a moment of scanning his face, casual and relaxed out of his tactical gear, his face open and laid-back when not flushed with cold or creased with concentration of trying to kill her.

She hasn’t seen him since Zagreb, and only knows his name from Fury and her own snooping – she can’t stop seeing the evaluating look on his face, the hesitation, the flash in his eyes when he changed his mind. She can’t stop wondering – why? What did he see in her that made her seem worth saving?

“Funny seeing you here,” he says, before she can work out what to even say to him. He’s grinning at her lazily, his eyes crinkling in a way that says he must smile a lot.

_What kind of assassin smiles a lot?_

“Likewise,” she manages warily, and, seemingly satisfied, he uncaps his soda and takes a sip.

She’s completely confused. He isn’t staring at her, trying to inspect her like all the other agents she passes in the halls do – he’s totally settled into the table like this is his spot, and is watching something behind her with easy amusement, like she wasn’t totally his mark a few weeks ago and this totally isn’t weird.

“Can I help you with something?” she finally asks after a few beats of silence, and his gaze flickers back to her.

“Oh, just figured I’d come say hi. Since I no longer have to kill you. I’m Clint, by the way. Barton.”

“I… okay,” she starts, folding her arms as she discards her sandwich crusts back onto her plastic cafeteria plate. People are typically only pleasant or personal when they want something, but he seems so bizarrely without agenda she doesn’t really know how to act around him. “Uh, hi.”

“What’re you calling yourself these days?”

“Agent Romanoff.”

“Nice. Got a first name to go with that?”

“Sure,” she evades with a polite smile.

“Ah, I see how it is,” he says kindly, but he doesn’t push. His gaze flickers to her plate, reaching forward like it’s the most normal thing in the world to take some fries off her. It’s the most startling thing she’s seen any of these agents do all month. “Cute accent, by the way.”

“Thanks.” He’s referring, of course, to her American accent, which she reverted to almost immediately after she signed the defection papers. That had been her worse class, back in the Red Room – which wasn’t saying much, she was the best student in her cohort – Cultural Studies & Assimilation. While she adopted languages and accents and covers quickly, her coldness, her tireless efficiency, were unyielding. She couldn’t force herself to be warm or personal for the sake of any cover. She could flirt, she could seduce, her wit could cut you in two. But she was distant. Restless. Easily bored – her headmistress used to _tsk_ in her ear, part admiration, part discipline: “ _you mustn’t play with your food, Natalia, you wicked, wicked girl.”_

He’s finished with her crusts. “Well,” he says, clearing his throat. “How’s about I walk you back to interrogation with Phil?”

She assumes he means Coulson, her most frequent handler. She’s been getting herself to her own appointments around here, so there’s no reason for him to need to escort her, no hidden objective, yet the friendliness of his offer is off-putting nonetheless. “That’s fine. I know my way.”

“I know, but I’m headed that direction anyway, so.” He gives her another easy smile. “I’m sort of surprised you haven’t made him cry yet, actually.”

She arches one quizzical brow.

“Oh, you know. He can be a bit of a light touch. Which I can imagine you’d be pretty impatient with.”

He’s not wrong. She doesn’t usually like it when people can get a read on her, but at the same time there’s a sort of fondness and familiarity in his voice as he says it, like she and him are old friends. It’s unsettling and inviting all at once.

“Well,” she starts uncertainly, “let me just bus my tray.”

“Sure. I’m right behind you.”  

 

* * *

 

 

She had a fair few other partners before she was assigned to Clint, each of whom Fury would claim she “ran off,” (she did _not,_ she couldn’t help that they were incompetent _)._ By that point, Agent Barton had become a familiar face around the agency, a greeting offered to her in the halls – “ _Agent Romanoff,_ ” he’d nod with a lazy smile – to perturb either her or the agents he himself was with, most of whom still looked at her like danger in human form.

She’s assigned to a mission in Milan two months after her registration as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, her first out of the country. Clint would laugh with her, years later, confessing that Fury had been combing through agents to go with her because most were convinced she’d stab them in the back the first chance she got and make a ushanka out of their skin.  _(“Guess I was the only one dumb enough not to be afraid of you.”_

_“Well, you certainly were dumb enough not to kill me in Zagreb.”_

_“Ah, but then I wouldn’t have anyone to dismember fat fascist dictators with.”)_

He’d volunteered – he’d been curious, was looking forward to see her work and was unconcerned that she might go triple agent on him. She didn’t know this at the time, of course. All she gets then is a report in her cubby with the brief and Agent Barton’s name typed up next to hers and she didn’t know how to feel about it. She sort of likes Barton. She doesn’t think she’s sort of liked anyone before.

He didn’t offer his reasons, though, when she asks how he ended up on the mission with her. “I raised my hand,” he confesses easily, prepping next to her in the opera box where the Ukrainian Prime Minister, whose assassination they’re supposed to prevent tonight, will sit when he arrives.

“What? Why?” she’s surprised. He’s probably the only agent who treats her like an actual person, but she didn’t think his friendliness would extend so far to actually _want_ to go on an international mission with her, away from back-up and his friends and whatever else he has back in the States.

“The pleasure of your company, of course,” he offers cheekily, and she shoots him a look.

He shrugs. “Fury’s not happy with me. He’s been withholding good missions. And this was a good mission.”

“Huh.” She hums, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I guess that makes sense. For Fury not to be happy.”

He feigns offense. “What do you mean?”

“Well. You obviously have an issue with authority and following orders.”

He squints at her. “I’m a nice guy. Therefore, I hesitate before killing little girls.”

“I’ve never been a little girl,” she says, more bitter than she intended.

He doesn’t press – he senses her weariness, the sharp edge to her voice, and continues without pulling on that thread. She’s thankful. “Well, how old are you?”

“How old are _you?_ ” she already knows. She did a background check as soon as she got access to agency files. Clint Barton, date of birth January 7, 1971. He’s thirty-four.

“I asked you first,” he counters childishly, poking out his tongue.

She smiles wryly. “That would be blowing my cover.”

“No, c’mon. Seriously. You’re – what, twenty-two?”

“Twenty,” she finds herself saying, before she can stop herself, and she’s shocked by her own honesty – it’s not a big thing, and it shouldn’t feel so bizarre to relay a simple fact to co-worker, but there’s something about Barton that suggests he’s asking out of genuine interest and she can’t help but feel at ease, or as at ease as someone like her could ever be.

“Twenty,” he echoes. “I’m losing missions to all these _children_.” Pause. “Granted, seems like the children are just better than me these days.”

She doesn’t bother denying it, and he bumps her shoulder playfully.

“You’re supposed to stroke my ego now.”

“Right.”

“‘Oh, no, Agent Barton, you’re a great agent, and an amazing shot, and you totally handed me my ass in Zagreb, Agent Barton, you’re just-’”

“Excuse me, you did _not_ ‘hand me my ass.’”

“Uh, pretty sure I did, and then I got you to defect _because_ I left you with no other choice, and now you’re all gung-ho, God-bless-America.”

She knows he’s only joking around with her, but her heart presses against her ribcage in discomfort. She’s very aware of this, and she’s very aware that she owes him her life – something she hoped she’d never have to owe anyone. It makes her tethered, indebted. Vulnerable.

He sees the laughter die on her lips and quickly reels back. “Hey, you know I’m just kidding. I’m very much aware you’re a super-scary-Soviet-assassin who could probably kill me with her thumb.”

She smiles only slightly, irritated to find that she’s fidgeting. “I just can’t stop wondering why you didn’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t be dense. Why you didn’t kill me in Zagreb.”

He seems untroubled by the question, merely shrugging. “Like I said. I don’t like the idea of killing little girls.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Sure it is,” he says dismissively, and that’s the end of that, the guests beginning to filter in and the two of them needing to take their places. “Ready to rock and roll?”

“I was born ready,” she shoots back cheesily, and her comic timing is all off and she’s too sardonic to be funny but he chuckles all the same and she’s oddly pleased.

She slips her gun out of her holster, and prepares for what she does best.

 

* * *

 

 

The mission is a success, and Clint doesn’t request a transfer. So they’re paired together on the next mission, and the next, and the next.

And so they’re partners.

 

* * *

 

 

In Omaha, they grab breakfast across the street from their motel. Clint insists on sharing an obnoxiously sized chocolate scone, and balks at her black coffee. ( _“Like my soul,”_ she says with a wink).

Natasha wants to go over logistics. Clint wants to whine about how she’s only picking at her scone.

“You’ve barely touched it.”

“What do you want me to do, _stroke_ it?”

He tells her he grew up sneaking chocolate scones from the carnie craft table. She calls chocolate an overrated Western thing.

"I can't believe you just said that," he seems genuinely offended by this.

“Sorry?” she shrugs, not sorry at all, sipping at her coffee.

“I cannot believe you just said that. Chocolate is the food of the gods.”

“I don’t know. I just don’t like it.”

“I. I don’t even know what to say to you. What kind of human being are you.” His eyes light up in some kind of feigned Eureka moment. “I know! – you’re not a human being. You’re some kind of ninja-assassin robot. A Terminator. That explains everything.”

She wracks her brain for the reference, and comes up short. “Never seen it.”

“Christ, you really are a Terminator,” he grumbles, but his eyes are full of warmth and humour, as he tears off some of his scone and pelts it at her. “Maybe, if we finish the mission fast enough, we can duck into a video store and I can educate you on the best films of all time.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, Barton. I’m always slowing down so you can catch up.”

“You wound me.”

She merely smiles.


End file.
